The Dinosaur Who Loved Me

No literary fad hits my juvenile funny bone quite like, Dinosaur Erotica. I haven’t read an entire book before (it’s just not my cup of tea) but I’ve read enough to know what it entails. I feel like these novels are more of a novelty distraction for readers. Like a car crash that entertains people as they drive by and then they move on.

One day at work, another manager was feeling down about life so I decided to regale her with a workplace appropriate chapter of Taken by the T-Rex on a Nook. The story went like this:

A woman can tell something is wrong with her boyfriend. He’s missing from bed late at night and he won’t answer her questions. She wakes up and he’s next to her, covered in dirt. One night she sneaks out into the woods, in time to see him gather with a bunch of buddies before they all transform into mighty T-Rex’s under a moonlit sky. She runs home in horror but her boyfriend knows she saw. Does he kill her? Does she leave him? No. He returns home in all of his T-Rex glory, ashamed and embarrassed, only to find out that she wouldn’t mind having a little T-Rex lovin’. That’s where I stopped reading of course, but by that time, Sam and I were laughing so hard, we were crying.

Yes, they are about humans having relations with dinosaurs. The laws of physics aside, readers are buying them up. Dinosaur Erotica is massive in scale (no pun intended) and have made the queen and king of the genre, Christy Sims and Chuck Tingle, very rich. Though neither will release their numbers, Sims has said that she now makes a larger yearly salary than her friend who is an engineer. It has spawned an entire sub-genre of, “Monster Erotica” and these novels (involving Yetis, trolls, or the Loch Ness Monster) rakes in millions of dollars every year. And these are just cheap, e-books. They aren’t even offered in paper form, though this may soon change.

With all of the money that’s flowing in, I have to say, this should be on Barnes & Noble’s radar.

I’ve noticed that B&N has been making some progressive moves lately, meant to compete with Amazon. Selling beer in stores and offering signings for self published authors is slick. Now they need to get some of these erotica selections into the stores and they’ll have another hit. Come on, we’ve carried werewolf porn for years. It’s not that far out of the spectrum of what B&N sells in its Romance sections. And if you want to argue that they’re poorly written (and they are) just open up any page of 50 Shades of Grey.

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Nicolina Torres

Nikki worked for Barnes & Noble for 15 years, in seven stores. She is the author of This Red Fire, Young Nation, and Girls Who Wear Glasses. She prefers to live in the country and is a new aunt to a potential bookworm.